We are come upon a time of death, a time when Mortality scales up and lays out everything at once. In your life, it is a news of a death of someone close, and then another, and then another, and then your facebook feed is full of deaths of friends of friends, people you’ve shared a meal with, people who are a voice and a way of seeing things and not merely a statistic.
People I love from church are already diagnosed and dying at home. Now we have news of more, another elder, again, cancer. We have our protocols and our way of dealing with it.
In our church, we sometimes delegate another to take our calls when the first stinging news hits, how like grit in a high wind. We can’t take the deluge of calls. Someone we love steps in.
There has been a lot of death in my life lately, but I’m not sorry for any of the dead. I’m sorry for the grieving and the dying, and I’m very sorry for myself, for feeling these things more than I should. When the feeling doesn’t turn to action, it’s sounding brass all the **** over again. I can grieve in service or I can stay quiet.
So I will admit that I’m sad, and that I have reason to be so, but I will also say that having snerted my little snert into the hem of my thankfully washable dress, I will try to write a funny scene, hopefully full of delicious slapstick and horrified parents. I can’t be of service, but I may at some point entertain.
Also, Mad Max is not all that great a movie. I’d give it a solid B+, although there are some indelible images in it.
Mad Max: Fury Road is essentially one long, incoherent chase scene, interrupted by about ten minutes of dialogue in the middle. If I hadn’t paid $12 to see it, I probably would have enjoyed it much more than I did. As it is, I felt cheated, as is often the case when I watch movies in theatres.